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Transhumanist Anders Sandberg: Embrace Strangeness

“That which does not kill us only makes us stranger.”

14 years ago, I sat down with Dr. Anders Sandberg, computational neuroscientist and research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, for his second appearance on my podcast. His twist on Nietzsche has stayed with me ever since.

This was 2012. Before ChatGPT, before CRISPR babies, before Neuralink implants in human skulls. And yet listen to what we covered:

The ethics of transhumanism and the limits of being human The Epic of Gilgamesh and humanity’s oldest obsession: immortality Enhancement arms-races and the risk of conflict between transhumanists and neo-luddites Hive-minds, distributed intelligence, and whether the Borg should scare us Mind uploading and what survives when the body doesn’t.

What strikes me now, rewatching it, is how little the fundamental questions have changed. The technology raced ahead. The philosophy is still catching up.

Anders argued that embracing strangeness is not a bug of the human future; it’s the feature. The question was never whether we would change. It’s whether we will change wisely.

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Team uses 3D printing to develop zinc-ion hybrid battery with seven times more energy

Storing solar and wind energy to meet the increasing power needs of the electrical grid calls for devices that can deliver power quickly, recharge quickly and last for decades at low cost. A new study led by UCLA has uncovered a technology that could meet all these criteria: a zinc-ion hybrid battery with a 3D-printed electrode that stores more than seven times the charge of similar hybrids.

Energy storage based on zinc instead of lithium would be cheaper and more sustainable because zinc is 100 times more abundant, easier to mine and easier to recycle.

“The future of energy storage won’t be defined by a single technology,” said co-corresponding author Maher El-Kady, an assistant researcher in UCLA College’s chemistry and biochemistry department. “At some point, we will need to look for something to complement the current options for grid-scale energy storage. What we’ve done in this study essentially gives us zinc-ion hybrid devices that can store nearly one order of magnitude higher capacity.”

Light switch wakes sleeping cancer cells and makes them vulnerable again

Some cancer cells can enter a dormant, sleep-like state that helps them survive treatment. Instead of continuing to grow and divide, these cells become largely inactive, allowing them to avoid the effects of many cancer drugs.

In certain forms of cancer, including some types of lung cancer, stress hormones can trigger this response. Specialized proteins called glucocorticoid receptors detect those hormones inside tumor cells. Once activated, the receptors can push the cells into a dormant state where cell division slows dramatically. As a result, many therapies become far less effective.

NASA testing advanced capabilities for moon, Mars rovers

On a bleak stretch of the Colorado Desert in Southern California, a compact four-wheeled rover recently trundled 16 miles (26 kilometers) with minimal intervention from the team of engineers trailing it. Called ERNEST (Exploration Rover for Navigating Extreme Sloped Terrain), this prototype is being used by NASA to advance both robotic autonomy and the ability to traverse challenging landscapes.

Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, ERNEST is 4 feet (1.2 meters) long. Not only can it lift each of its mesh wheels to get past obstacles that would stymie Curiosity and Perseverance, NASA’s six-wheeled Mars rovers, but the prototype also has enhanced independent decision-making capabilities. These mobility and autonomy advances could be infused into future missions that will venture into previously inaccessible areas of the red planet or the moon.

In the field, ERNEST served as a testbed for a potential future lunar mission requiring higher speeds and much greater mileage than can be accomplished by current rovers. This technology could be used to inform future designs for exploration efforts on the moon and beyond.

Soundwaves could power a new kind of chip inspired by the human brain

Neuromorphic computing is a computing approach that mimics how the human brain works. Our gray matter is a marvel of nature, capable of handling huge volumes of data with incredible energy efficiency. While modern AI hardware is becoming better at processing complex tasks, it consumes vast amounts of energy.

One of the promises of neuromorphic computing is that it places memory and processing in the same location, using far less energy than traditional AI chips. However, even the most sophisticated neuromorphic systems are fairly simple and don’t come close to matching the number of connections among human neurons.

But a new study published in the journal Science Advances suggests that by using sound waves instead of electricity, hardware can better mimic the parallel processing of neurons with even greater efficiency.

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